66 PRE-ANIMISM 



female principles of human life." 1 Commenting on this, 

 Mr. Haigh remarks that " there is no trace whatever of the 

 worship of gods in temples, or of any attempt to portray 

 them in human form prior to the introduction of Greek 

 influences." 2 This stage of the god-idea has illustration in 

 Herodotus (ii, 52) when, speaking of the Pelasgians, he 

 says : " They gave no title or name to any of their gods, 

 for they had not yet heard any, but they called them gods 

 (0eovc) from some such notion as this, that they had set 

 (flf'vrec) in order all things, and so had the distribution of 

 everything." Like conceptions governed the attitude of our 

 German forefathers worshipping in groves temples not 

 made by hands the secret presence, seen only by the eye 

 of faith (quod sola reverentia videt). 



Warped by theories of a primitive monotheism, mission- 

 aries, and even philologists, have mistranslated words of 

 vague significance, like manitou and the rest, as " god " and 

 cognate terms, thus extending currency to the notion that to 

 the Red Indian, Australian, and other aborigines, there had 

 been given quasi-revelation concerning an All-Father or 

 Great Spirit. On the contrary, so far as we can " think 

 black," and so get at the back of the barbaric mind, we find 

 that, in the evolution of the god-idea, the passage is made 

 from a vague, inchoate Naturism to a definite, concrete 

 Animism which draws its support from divers sources ; 

 among these, to once more quote Hobbes, " four things 

 opinions of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion 

 towards what men fear, and taking of things casuall for 

 prognostiques. In these consisteth the naturall seed of 

 religion." 3 



Nothing came suddenly into being; there are no leaps 

 either in the psychical or the physical ; and these tentative 

 conceptions may be compared with the rude eoliths found on 

 the Kent plateaus, or with the beak-shaped flints discovered 

 in the Red Crag of Suffolk, in which, possibly, are to be 

 detected the prototypes of the somewhat more symmetrical 

 palaeoliths of river-drift and cavern. Even if the monotheistic 

 idea could be proved to precede the polytheistic, its value as 

 a permanent factor in spiritual evolution is impaired in the 

 universal supersession of the great deities by the crowd of 

 godlings whom man has envisaged as controlling, for good or 



1 Warde Fowler's Roman Festivals, p. 337. 



2 Contemporary Review, January, 1908, p. 32. 



3 Leviathan, Part I, ch. xii. 



